Actually, Trump did not win all of the working-class vote, according to exit polls. He won the white working-class vote.
While many white working-class Trump supporters say that racism and discrimination weren’t reasons they supported Trump, several studies say otherwise.
The latest “Roseanne” episode features a plotline in which the star and the Conner family end up stereotyping their Muslim neighbors.
In the episode, Roseanne’s character told her Muslim neighbors: “We don’t hate you; we’re scared of you.”
The president’s critics say he sometimes stokes those fears in white working-class America.
Following an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris that November, Trump told MSNBC that he would “strongly consider” closing certain U.S. mosques.
As a candidate, he also repeatedly claimed to have seen Muslims in Jersey City celebrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — even after it was debunked.
This type of campaign rhetoric had an impact on voters that resemble the Conner family.
According to the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a research collaboration of nearly two dozen analysts and scholars from across the political spectrum, white voters who went from voting for President Barack Obama in 2012 to backing Trump in 2016 were motivated in part by their views on Muslims as well as immigration and blacks.
Other polls showed that Trump supporters were more likely to have negative views of Muslims than people who did not vote for the president, which may have led to their higher support for Trump’s Muslim ban and other policies that curtail the number of Muslims in America.
In one of the last scenes of the episode, Roseanne defended one of her Muslim neighbors when a grocery store cashier basically tells her to go back to her country after she is short $30.
It is notable for Barr to acknowledge that Islamophobia among white working-class Trump supporters is a thing, especially considering how often the president’s surrogates deny that cultural anxiety influenced their vote, despite the amount of data saying otherwise.
While the ending did a fine job of tying up an episode of the sitcom, it is understandable that viewers, particularly Muslims, might find it hard to believe that a supporter of Trump would publicly come to their defense in real life.
A Pew Research Center survey published last year stated that about three-quarters of Muslim Americans (74 percent) say Trump is unfriendly toward them. It’s likely they feel the same way about his supporters, especially since there isn’t much evidence that they came to this community’s defense when the discrimination was coming from the man they elected.
